The Congregation as Retreat Center and Intentional Community: Pastoral Sensemaking in an Age of Individualization

Abstract

Drawing from narrative interviews with eight Protestant pastors in the U.S. and Canada, this paper explores community-building under the conditions of late modernity through the lenses of individualization and sensemaking. Exploring pastoral approaches to what Ulrich Beck calls “institutionalized individualism”, this paper argues that pastoral sensemaking manages polarities between the societal demand for self-construction and the human need to belong, between an individual’s freedom to make a life (or god) of their own and the fact that such work requires a community. Pastoral leaders manage this polarity through sensemaking strategies that strengthen and clarify the central values and practices of the congregation while also managing the boundaries of the congregation, envisioning the congregation as a retreat center in some cases and as an intentional community in others. In an age of individualization, pastoral leadership requires the dexterity to move between dynamic collective and individual identities, making processes of belonging a collaborative sensemaking effort in which boundaries are drawn, enacted, erased, and redrawn in new ways.

1. Introduction

Over the past several decades, participation in voluntary associations and congregations has been in steep decline. In books like Bowling Alone and the subsequent research it inspired, Robert Putnam and others have assembled a wide range of explanations for this phenomenon (Putnam 2000; Lim and Putnam 2010; Gamm and Putnam 1999). Americans have more leisure and entertainment options than fifty years ago. Changes in family structure and economic pressures have resulted in more two-income families and single-parent households than in previous eras. The gig economy makes regular participation in church and voluntary associations more difficult. Somewhat neglected in this conversation are the structural dimensions of late modernity, which seem to make joining anything a heroic act of resistance. We live in, what Derek Thompson has termed, the “Anti-Social Century”, characterized, not by loneliness, but rather a self-chosen isolation (Thompson 2025). In an era of screen-mediated relationships, political polarization, and diminished civil society, cultivating community is not only a struggle but something that runs against the grain of modern experience.

The challenge is deeper, however, than social media habits or our post-pandemic preference for introversion. Contemporary life is structured around the individual quest for meaning and identity, a process sociologists call “individualization” (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002). The institutions, social arrangements, and narratives of late modernity have cut us off from the communities which once provided a sense of belonging and identity, such as church, family, and neighborhood, placing us within an impossible—but also exhilarating—contradiction. We are both free and bound. We are free to construct our own sense of self but also bound to social structures that make self-construction a never-ending, open-ended, life-long project. We are free to elect the communities we might join, and yet the elective nature of such joining mitigates against the social stability promised by belonging. As creatures of a previous voluntarist era, congregations are not well-adapted to late modernity.1 What does community-building look like in our age of individualization?

Drawing from narrative interviews with eight Protestant pastors in the U.S. and Canada, this paper explores community-building under the conditions of late modernity through the lenses of individualization and sensemaking. I argue that pastoral sensemaking in an age of individualization embraces the contradictions of late modernity by managing the polarity between self-construction and community-building, between an individual’s freedom to make a life (or god) of their own and the fact that such work requires a community. Pastoral leaders manage this polarity through sensemaking strategies that strengthen and clarify the central values and practices of the congregation while also managing the boundaries of the congregation, envisioning the congregation as a retreat center in some cases and as an intentional community in others. In an age of individualization, pastoral leadership requires the dexterity to move between dynamic collective and individual identities, making processes of belonging a collaborative sensemaking effort in which boundaries are drawn, enacted, erased, and redrawn in new ways.

2. Religion in an Age of Individualization

For decades, sociologists have tried to name and understand the strange form of disconnection and disorientation that characterizes life in the modern West. High levels of societal differentiation between family, work, neighborhood, leisure activities, religion, etc. grant us a great deal of personal freedom. We are “disembedded” from the old structures that once determined the shape and direction of our lives and set free in a world of possibility (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002, p. xxi). But freedom comes with a cost. Free from the old structures, we are burdened with possibility and choice, deciding who we are and will be, what we will do and what it all means.2 At one level, congregations in the United States have always had to cultivate and form community under these conditions. The voluntarist nature of congregational life pits congregations against one another in a competition for participants, donations, and volunteers (Finke and Stark 1992). Unlike some other Western contexts, the United States inherited an audience-centered and entrepreneurial religious sector (Hatch 1989, pp. 9–12). But at another level, things have changed in the last several decades. Younger generations of churchgoers do not attend church with the same frequency. Church membership rolls struggle to keep members engaged. Modernity has intensified and the disembedding processes of a differentiated society have led to a heightened and radicalized form of voluntarism.3 We might choose to volunteer or attend church, but we are much less likely to join or participate with consistency.

According to the German sociologist Ulrich Beck, such changes to patterns of joining and belonging must be understood at the structural level rather than the individual level. In other words, we do not freely choose a life of endless possibility; we have been set adrift by the institutions and social realities of late modern life (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002). For, unlike previous eras, identity is not granted or given to a person by way of traditional or institutional constraints, such as class or religion or village or family. Rather, identity is a life-long project that is reflexive rather than reflective.4 Disembedded from traditional or institutional pathways for identity, we individuals have no place from which to stand, no solid earth upon which to plant our feet and reflect upon our lives or to construct our biography. Beck calls this “institutionalized individualism”5 (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002, p. 12). It is a form of individualism thrust upon us and sustained—even amplified—by the institutions of late modernity. While it can be confused for the autonomous individualism promised by neoliberalism, it is not the same thing.6 For, rather than cultivate a self-sufficient individualism, the institutional and relational complexities of everyday life make us “self-insufficient” (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002, p. xxi). We have the freedom to construct a self (as promised by neoliberal economics), but the same structures that free or disembed us also deny meaningful integration. We are employees and little league coaches and parents and consumers who are “constantly changing between different, partly incompatible logics of action [and] forced to take into [our] hands that which is in danger of breaking into pieces: [our] own lives” (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002, p. 23). In this, we are “forced to seek biographical solutions to systemic contradictions” (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002, p. xxii). Individualization, then, is neither a choice nor a solitary effort, but rather a fact of modern life cultivated by modern institutions which direct each of us to create, as Beck says, “a life of one’s own” together.

Beck’s theory of individualization bears similarities to several other accounts of modern life. In moral philosophy, Alistair MacIntyre connects the moral incoherence of modern life with high levels of institutional differentiation. Lives broken up into different fragments are not able to be pulled together into a meaningful, integrated, and coherent account of the good life (MacIntyre 2007). In sociology, Zygmunt Bauman describes the “liquid” stage of modernity, where the solid social structures that once guided our lives have melted and become more fluid, less secure. The liquification of once-secure institutions, such as family, class, and religion, cast us adrift in a sea of possibilities, but without any objects on the horizon by which we might navigate. As Bauman says, “[o]urs is, as a result, an individualized, privatized version of modernity, with the burden of pattern-weaving and the responsibility for failure falling primarily on the individual’s shoulders” (Bauman 2000, pp. 7–8). In philosophy, Charles Taylor has spent decades providing a phenomenology of modern selfhood, describing us as “buffered” (Taylor 2007) and “punctual” selves (Taylor 1989); we are self-directed agents, in which our “ultimate purposes are those which arise within [us], the crucial meanings are those defined in [our] responses to them” (Taylor 2007, p. 38). Free for self-construction, we seek authenticity, above all. In each case, the structural conditions of modern life—high differentiation, low trust in institutions, a “punctual” and “buffered” self, social and narrative fragmentation—make us responsible to construct a self, to curate an identity or identities, amid the cultural and narrative fragments we have available: a “do-it-yourself biography”, a “risk biography”, a “tightrope biography” that could always be otherwise and is “a state of permanent (partly overt, partly concealed) endangerment” (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002, p. 3).

Given “institutionalized individualism” in “liquid modernity”, it is not difficult to recognize the headwinds for congregational leaders and also for those seeking a well-integrated spirituality. In seeking to cultivate religious community, congregational leaders create room for individuals working out their own identities, their own lives, their own sense of god. For Beck, this presents an incredible opportunity. Free to live a life of one’s own, people might elect for altruism. Free to find a god of one’s own, people might finally sever the threads that connect religious enthusiasm and religious violence (Beck 2010). But Beck’s hopes do not help the pastor working with individuals compelled by never-ending identity construction. Under the conditions of late modernity, congregations are just one set of cultural materials individuals draw upon to weave a coherent identity or to live a meaningful life. And, as Nancy Ammerman found in her study of everyday American spirituality, many spiritual seekers not rooted in faith communities struggle to find integrity between their spiritual desires and actual spiritual practice. In short, those who belong to congregations are able to express their spirituality in more consistent ways, but the nature of institutionalized individualism makes such joining difficult, if not culturally odd, and so congregations and everyday Americans have a hard time finding one another (Ammerman 2014, pp. 288–93). These are not necessarily conditions religious leaders can change but rather the situation in which they must work, where they can learn to cultivate space for identity-building while also offering an invitation to membership and participation. As a theory for how we make a meaningful world and live in it at the same time, sensemaking offers one vantage point from which we might pay better attention to the fluid individualizing dynamics of contemporary life and the strategies pastors are employing in their work to offer spiritual resources and create communities of belonging.

3. Sensemaking and the Religious Leader

A group of Hungarian soldiers were lost in the mountains after a training mission went awry. After several days of snow and inclement weather, they began to lose hope until one soldier discovered a map in his gear. The team sprang to action, gathered around the map, and began to make their way back to the base. It was not until they were safe and warm that they noticed that they had the wrong map all along. It was a map of the Pyrenees. They were lost in the Alps. In the end, it mattered less that they had the right map and more that the map gave them a sense of purpose and hope. For the organizational theorist Karl Weick, the lost soldiers illustrate the nature of sensemaking. The accuracy of the map mattered less than the fact that it gave them a frame—a sense of order and an orderly world—from which they could evaluate and track their movement through the mountains (Weick 1995, pp. 54–55). The map, the attentiveness to environmental cues, and the retrospective narration of their steps all came together in a way that allowed the soldiers to take meaningful action while also paying attention to what their action created: use the map to take steps in a direction, and then pay attention to where those steps lead one, and then use the map to take new steps forward and to pay attention once again to where those steps lead. This, for Weick, is the process of sensemaking, which has seven properties: it is (1) Grounded in identity construction; (2) Retrospective; (3) Enactive of Sensible Environments; (4) Social; (5) Ongoing; (6) Focused on and by Extracted Cues; and (7) Driven by Plausibility rather than Certainty (17). Weick describes sensemaking in the following way:

Once people begin to act (enactment) they generate tangible outcomes (cues) in some context (social), and this helps them to discover (retrospect) what is occurring (ongoing), what needs to be explained (plausibility), and what should be done next (identity enhancement).

(Weick 1995, pp. 54–55)

These seven properties offer a way to theorize how people move through the world and how we organize ourselves. Our actions in the world invite a response, which we then seek to understand in light of the story we tell ourselves about who we are, where we are going, and what should be done next.

At the simplest level, sensemaking is about finding a plausible relation between a present experience (a “cue”) and one’s picture of the world (a “frame”). At times, this involves adopting a new picture of the world. At other times, it involves finding a new way to fit one’s experience into a current understanding of the world and one’s place in it (Weick 1995, pp. 43–49). Either way, sensemaking is an ongoing process which both creates and responds to a world by finding a relation between cue and frame. For Weick, cues provide the occasion for sensemaking. They are often surprises or interruptions to the normal flow of life, which “ensnare” present experience and become the prompt or seed from which new meaning-making might take place (Weick 1995, p. 111). As meaning-making organisms, we respond to a surprise or interruption by looking for a way to relate the cue to a “frame”, or the larger story we tell about ourselves or our world (Weick 1995, p. 110). In the story of the lost Hungarian soldiers, changes in topography provided cues. The map provided a frame. They made sense of their situation and moved effectively through the world by finding a plausible relationship between cue and frame.

Searching for a plausible relationship between cue and frame within the constant flow of life and experience, successful and plausible sensemaking often does one of two things. It either (1) “preserves flow and continuity” by wrapping the cue into an existing frame or (2) it enacts boundaries in the world to create discontinuity (Weick 1995, p. 108). When sensemaking offers continuity with an existing frame, it works at the level of relation. It finds a way to make a plausible connection—to explain—the connection between one’s current experience and the bigger picture within which one is operating. When sensemaking enacts a boundary, it then sets new conditions in the world which persons and communities seek to justify by further sensemaking processes. In this case, sensemaking works at the level of the frame, offering a new picture of things that can accommodate the cue. Whether sensemaking establishes a sense of discontinuity or continuity, we work to make such conclusions plausible within the larger flow of experience. For example, a terse encounter with a neighbor (cue) might lead one to search for evidence that he had a bad day (frame—continuity) and therefore the exchange should not be overanalyzed, leading to a plausible and continuous account of the interaction. Or, this same encounter might lead one to search for evidence that this person is untrustworthy (frame—discontinuity) and so decide to limit interactions with or even act cool or hostile toward the neighbor, thus enacting a new boundary that makes it more likely that relations will become distant, creating the real-world conditions that confirm the new interpretation of the relationship.

For Weick—and, crucially for my concerns in this paper—sensemaking is social in the sense that it is both intersubjective and a function of organizations themselves. Organizations, as collections of people, are created by the sensemaking activities of their participants. And, as social entities that act collectively in a world of actors, organizations are sensemaking organisms. This is true, of course, for religious organizations and religious practice, and pastoral work is situated in the middle of these dynamics (Cormode 2006). In our contemporary environment, congregations are wrestling with a host of disruptive cues—lower participation, underserved committees, rising median age and less engagement from younger members, a polarized social and political context, etc. But those who participate in congregations are also sensemakers, responding to their own disruptive cues while navigating the social terrain of institutionalized individualism. And pastors or religious leaders cultivate the space within which these processes play out, making ad hoc choices about the type of boundaries to cultivate as part of the sensemaking process. And this is where congregational leadership faces an impossible tension. For congregations are not social clubs or neighborhood associations. They are ordered and organized as religious communities, promising to integrate the disparate parts of one’s identity into a vocational whole—as persons created and called by God. The nature of a Christian congregation as a church—the gathered and sent “Body of Christ”—pits congregational identity (the congregational frame) against the cultural conditions of institutionalized individualism.

Two extremes pull at the congregational leader. On the one hand, these conditions necessitate the creation of ideological and social boundaries. The invitation to join a community, to connect oneself to the “Body of Christ” through Baptism and Eucharist, to participate in a shared life of spiritual practice and mission, is a very particular kind of frame, a specific way of understanding the world and one’s place in it. In cultivating some sort of intentional community, pastoral sensemaking offers a particular frame, creates a boundary, and invites individuals to join in the life of the community. This aligns with Weick’s notion of discontinuous sensemaking. We might expect this to be a more difficult choice given the conditions of institutionalized individualization. On the other hand, the conditions of late modernity might pressure the congregation to provide a set of resources for individuals as they seek to find purpose and construct an identity. In this case, the congregation can function as a retreat center in which pastoral sensemaking helps individuals find a continuous relationship between a present challenge in their lives (the cue) and an operative picture of the world (frame). The pastor thus accompanies the individual in their own sensemaking journey, offering them support in their quest for a spiritual integration. In what follows, I explore the nature of such sensemaking work among experienced pastors representative of mainline and evangelical Protestantism in the United States and Canada. Using the sensemaking framework developed here, I explore the nature of such boundary work under the conditions of late modernity to show how pastoral work navigates and works through this tension.

4. Sensemaking in an Age of Individualization

Over the course of two months in early 2025, I interviewed eight experienced pastors and encouraged them to reflect upon their engagement with congregants and their broader community under the conditions of late modernity.7 The pastors represented diverse theological commitments, geographic locales, and forms of community. Several led more traditional congregations with the full set of expected programs and committees. Others led multi-congregational churches or small, intimate congregations organized around shared meals and practices of hospitality. Developing what John Swinton and Harriet Mowatt call “ideographic” knowledge, this particular project does not seek to develop an empirical account of pastoral practices across the country but rather to describe and understand the ways some pastors approach questions of participation and belonging in their ministries and to place these practices into dialogue with research on individualization and organizational sensemaking (Swinton and Mowat 2006, pp. 43–44). Interviews followed the protocols for narrative inquiry, seeking to understand pastoral experience by way of the stories they told about their own leadership and the participation of their congregants (Clandinin and Connelly 2000). Interviews were recorded and coded for sensemaking strategies. In short, the selection of congregational leaders is not meant to be a representative sample of pastors or Protestantism but rather an archaeological exploration of pastoral sensemaking strategies, an attempt to unearth and understand ways in which pastors are navigating this moment through a sensemaking lens. As with a case study method or an ethnography, the interviews generate opportunities for “resonance” and “identification” (Swinton and Mowat 2006, pp. 46–47) or even allegories by which we might understand and redescribe our own experience (Clifford and Marcus 1986, p. 98ff).

Overall, pastoral sensemaking work focused on boundary maintenance, moving between two seemingly incompatible aims—offering the permeability demanded by this age of individualization in some cases and constructing a firm boundary that resists the fluidity of movement demanded by individualization in others. In the first case, pastors made the spiritual resources of their congregation available to individuals in search of spiritual and/or vocational meaning. These individuals are invited to fit the cue which drew them to the congregation into an existing frame—sensemaking provides continuity in one’s identity and understanding of the world. Relations of continuity tended to center the congregation around particular values while minimizing the sense of a boundary. These approaches created a porous membrane between congregation and world, giving individuals an opportunity to build their own spiritual identity with the resources granted by the congregation: the retreat center. In the second case, pastors clarify a boundary that defines the community and invite the individual to join. The boundary offers a new frame to individuals and sensemaking provides discontinuity in one’s understanding of oneself and the world. Relations of discontinuity identified and created a boundary between congregation and world, giving individuals an invitation to cross a particular social threshold and join a community: the intentional community. In both cases, sensemaking in the interviews took the form of boundary work, with pastors employing both strategies with some fluidity.

4.1. Continuity with the Frame: The Retreat Center

Sensemaking begins with the cue: an unforeseen interruption, an experience that does not match expectations, a misunderstanding or new insight. In the language of Weick, such experiences become a prompt from which sensemaking begins to look for a relation between the present cue and a frame which can integrate or make sense of the cue. Nearly all the pastors interviewed described this work between cue and frame in terms of continuity, where they sought to make a connection between the present set of cues and an existing frame. Such strategies often did two things at once: (1) they connected the cue to the individual’s sense of who they were, (2) by centering and making available a core dimension of the congregation’s identity or gifts. This is the form of pastoral sensemaking one might expect in response to individualization.

Rev. H8 serves a large African American congregation in a major eastern city. Around COVID-19, the congregation merged with another congregation and exercised a great deal of creativity to keep its doors open to the public. Such efforts garnered a reputation as a community church, a church open and available to the neighborhood. In the years since the pandemic, the congregation has built upon these connections, establishing itself as trusted partner in its region of the city for churched and unchurched alike. Public worship casts a wide net, including long-time members, online viewers, and one-time visitors. A trusted neighbor, the congregation hosts several funerals a month for non-members, providing pastoral services for neighbors in need. Rev. H’s congregation offers a compelling set of programs organized around core values of the congregation, such as mutual care, hospitality, and service. These programs are made available for members and neighbors, who are encouraged to come as they are and engage in any way that meets their needs. In sensemaking terms, various cues might drive individuals toward the congregation, and the congregation provides resources (pastoral/spiritual care, worship, spiritual practices) to help individuals make a connection between the cue and a larger frame. In these cases, the church functions as a retreat center, providing resources for individuals to connect cues with a frame.

A similar dynamic shapes Rev. R’s congregation, a mid-sized majority white church in the Pacific Northwest. Even though Rev. R’s congregation is organized as a set of intentional communities with a high boundary for entry, the congregation also seeks to cultivate partnerships with a wide range of neighborhood organizations as part of its missional identity. Responding to perceived needs in the neighborhood, volunteers often find themselves participating in the life of the congregation in important ways—working with a feeding program, serving with a refugee resettlement program—without ever joining the church or one of the intentional communities. Such partners are drawn to the mission of Rev. R’s congregation to seek the well-being of the neighborhood but tend to do so on their own terms. They see in the congregation an opportunity to respond to a need in their community (food/housing insecurity, care for refugees, etc.) in a way that bears integrity with their own sense of identity. Again, it is the congregation’s clear sense of values and mission to care for the neighborhood that makes it possible for those outside the congregation to come and receive resources to make sense of their own spiritual lives and identity, to connect cue and frame. So also, Rev. W, who serves a mid-sized African American church in the Northeast, responded to significant turmoil in his congregation by clarifying values around service, and then inviting congregants and newcomers to find a way to serve one another and the broader community.

When offering resources to help individuals connect cue and frame, pastors must balance openness with clarity. They are open to the meaning individuals might make from their interactions with the congregation while also remaining clear about the purpose and nature of the programming or resources that they make available. Rev. A communicates this tension by describing congregational involvement as an elliptical orbit. Because she serves a university population, she often sets up a table at various campus events, communicating the ideals of the congregation along with its celebration of LBGTQ identities. At times, people are drawn close to the community, curious about the life of faith and participating in Bible study or worship or activism. And then something happens and they pull away—for months, sometimes years—before eventually curving back to the community. For Rev. A, the orbit speaks to the histories of “church hurt” experienced by her (mostly) queer congregants. In such a situation, the church provides a consistent presence, and she makes herself available for “non-invasive, non-committal … meeting[s]” to accompany participants. Those in orbit are invited to make sense of their lives on their own terms, while Rev. A and her leadership team make clear their values and the ways they can support those seeking a connection to the congregation. Rev. C also describes the balancing act of pastoral sensemaking in an age of individualization. She has cultivated a flat, non-hierarchical approach to congregational life in which individual voices and contributions are valued as part of worship. To create such a space, she needs to be clear about the nature of the community and the importance of listening, hospitality, and sharing space with others. But these central values also require her to share power, to make room for the many stories and perspectives in the community. And so they have an open microphone as part of worship, which can make for “uncomfortable moments”, because “when you share power … you’re letting go of that narrative control”. She clarifies a particular center of the congregation so that she might accompany individuals in their own spiritual journeys.

In a congregational setting, sensemaking that allows for continuity between a cue and a frame often concedes control of the process. Various cues compel individuals toward the church—a pandemic, a personal crisis, curiosity, a desire to serve the neighborhood, the surprise of an LGBTQ-affirming congregation, etc. And these individuals bring with them a wide variety of frames for making sense of their lives. Those orbiting Rev. A’s congregation might hope to reconcile the cue of a queer-celebrating church with a history of church hurt. Those drawing from Rev. H’s neighborhood-focused programming might try to connect the cue of a particular challenge in life with a spiritual heritage or memory of church involvement. Those volunteering with Rev. R’s church might try to connect the cue of real needs in the neighborhood with their own sense of being a good person or contributing to the common good. In these situations, pastoral leaders lean into the ambiguity by offering a clear set of values-based programming or resources through which individuals might make their own meaning. Pastors do not offer a frame for interpretation, and thus create a new boundary between congregation and the world, but rather they hold open some central value or practice of the congregation and make it available to individuals. This results in an approach to community building that looks like a retreat center. The congregation opens itself up to others in order to accompany them in their own spiritual journeys: pastoral sensemaking for the age of individualization.

But this was not the only pastoral sensemaking strategy deployed. For each pastor interviewed, sensemaking also moved in the other direction by encouraging individuals to adopt a new frame and to join the congregation in a new way. Here sensemaking creates a boundary and invites a decision—to join or not to join. Such boundaries stand in tension with the first open-ended form of sensemaking. Where the first helps individuals form a continuous sense of self and world, the second interrupts individualization in favor of a communal interpretation of their journey. In the terms of individualization theory, the first offers pastoral sensemaking to disembedded agents. The second re-embeds the individual in the life of an intentional community.

4.2. Discontinuity with the Frame: The Intentional Community

As developed above, sensemaking finds a relation between a cue and a frame. At times, pastoral sensemaking offers materials for individuals to discern or discover a relationship between a cue and a frame. For example, when an individual who sees herself as the kind of person who cares for the poor and hungry (frame) encounters an unhoused person rummaging through a dumpster behind her building (cue), she might turn toward Rev. C’s intentional community for volunteer opportunities in order to stabilize and reinforce her identity. In this case, pastoral leadership offers a ready-made relation between cue and frame for individuals seeking to develop their own spiritual and moral/ethical biographies. In such cases, congregations need to have clear programs, values, and practices that people can join on their own terms. A “center” to which individuals can relate.

In other cases, however, pastoral leaders offered a new frame and invited individuals to place the cue in a new context, to cross a social or ideational boundary and thus enact a new identity in the world. In offering a new frame, pastoral leaders created discontinuity between the individual’s self-directed journey, revealing the person within the conditions of institutionalized individualism to be “self-insufficient”, as Beck says (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002, p. xxi). That is, the disembedded “life of one’s own” requires some level of embeddedness in relationships, communities, and organizations, even if that embeddedness is episodic and mutable (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002). In a somewhat surprising twist, pastoral leaders reported that the conditions of individualization have created room for deeper and more intentional (but also short-term) commitments to the life of the congregation than earlier in their ministry. In offering a frame, pastoral sensemaking creates discontinuity for individuals by: (1) establishing an adversarial boundary between the congregation and the larger world and/or (2) creating a protective boundary between congregation and world to build a sense of intimacy and intentionality with regard to the practices and life of the church. Such boundaries offer a new frame to individuals and invite them to join a particular community as part of their own spiritual journey.

4.2.1. Taking a Stand: Discontinuity with the World

Several pastors described moments of moral reckoning as formative for their communities. In such cases, the moral claim made by the congregation and/or pastoral leader offered a frame in response to the challenge or issue arising in the city/nation/world (cue). For example, after the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, Rev. A knew that things had changed in her neighborhood and congregation. Situated near a major university and in a neighborhood with a large Jewish population, the broad progressive, center-left consensus fractured, with groups dividing along Palestinian and Israeli lines in the days after the attack and leading up to Israel’s military incursion in Gaza. Strong feelings surfaced. Protests broke out on the university campus in support of Palestine while other groups vocalized their solidarity with Israel. And the congregation felt called to do something. Drawing upon its commitment to liberationist LGBTQ theologies, the leadership invited those unsettled by the situation to join them in protesting the war in Gaza. It placed them “on the edge”, as Rev. A said, “because there were so many people in [our neighborhood] who were involved in those civic actions. But there were also a lot of people in [the neighborhood] who did not appreciate it at all”. The war and the divide in the progressive community were disruptive cues in the community. Rev. A and her leadership team responded by offering a frame for these cues—connecting the Palestinian plight with God’s liberative work—and thus took a particular kind of stand, inviting others to join them. Those that did adopt the frame given by Rev. A’s congregation joined a particular community in a public way, marking out a new boundary for the participants and the congregation.

Rev. B’s congregation has also taken clear positions in opposition to local public opinion. Located in a major American city, Rev. B’s congregation has found itself struggling against the neighborhood association, police, and city council representatives who support aggressive policing and restrictive housing policies that disproportionately impact people of color. In response to conflicts around policing, fair housing, and economic opportunity, Rev. B offers a frame they call the “gospel mandate”, which means a holistic concern for the well-being of those harmed by the current system. Such a mandate marks out a boundary and sets up an adversarial approach to those organizations and political actors who promote unjust and unfair practices and policies. This makes Rev. B’s congregation strange in the neighborhood, such that joining the congregation means aligning oneself with a particular moral and political orientation. In response to the cues of neighborhood concerns regarding public safety and house prices, the “gospel mandate” provides a frame that invites a decision, inviting one to join the resistance and try on a new identity.

The adversarial approach also shows up in response to political polarization and the nationalization of politics. Two different pastors reflected upon the ways in which national conversations create local pressures in the congregation to act or make a statement. In both cases, they offered a frame that heightened the importance of the concrete, local, and embodied, thus cultivating a boundary between the local and the national, concrete ethical demands and abstract ideologies. Rev. D serves a congregation in a conservative exurb that has avoided making any public statements about their views on gay, lesbian, or transgender issues. While both pastors at the church are LGBTQ-affirming, the elder board and membership is divided on the issue. Amid pressure to take a side, Rev. D has instead reinterpreted these cues in light of the concrete ethical demand to love one’s neighbor, seeking to make space for all kinds of people, commenting how some gay and lesbian members “want a community where they can go to church and their conservative dad can come too … because they’re working this out in their life, and they would like the local church to be a part of that … it’s really only the political discourse that was pressuring us to be affirming or not. It’s not the local community”. In a similar turn toward the local and particular, Rev. B reflected upon the first months of the new U.S. presidential administration and the trauma this has caused their progressive, diverse congregation. In one recent sermon, they read from a list of executive orders, many of which attack the gender and sexual and racial identities of those in the congregation, and then turned toward the vocation of the church as the gathered body of Christ, recognizing that presidential declarations have no bearing on the concrete and local reality of the church: “…the executive orders don’t define church. In fact, that’s the blessing of church … nothing that has been declared has anything to do with us. The gospel we declared last week is the same this week … while there might be some places that don’t comply with the gospel mandate, that is not us. We are compliant. We are compliant with the gospel, but not that national current”. In both cases, the disruptive and highly emotional cues of national political news and pressures were redirected by a new frame which heightened the ethical and theological importance of their actual neighbors. The frame recontextualized national polarizing trends by focusing attention on the immediate ethical demand to love one’s neighbor, creating a boundary between the prevalent social imaginary and the concrete life of the community.

4.2.2. Cultivating Intimacy: Discontinuity from the World

In pastoral sensemaking, frames are not only used to take a stand against some prevailing social issue or pressure. They are also utilized to create a safe space within the ebb and flow of everyday life for community intimacy and spiritual formation. Rev. G pastors a large majority white mainline congregation on the West Coast with a well-connected and active social justice ministry. Rev. G notes that, in a context where fewer people attend church, church attendance and participation take on an unexpected intensity because people do not show up to church by accident or under social pressure. Rev. G has seen this in an annual men’s gathering and an adult formation group. In recent years, both ministries have increased in intensity and intentionality, asking participants to commit to shared spiritual practices and rhythms of prayer and study. Such changes, Rev. G says, have been driven by participants who see in shared, intentional, rhythms of study and prayer “companionship in the life of faith”. The temptation, Rev. G admits, is to “lower the bar a little bit” given the challenges congregations face in post-Christendom contexts, but many of the cues that drive individuals to go to church—a spiritual crisis, curiosity, loneliness, a spiritual awakening—demand a new frame within which to fit and make sense of their experiences. Drawing from Christian spirituality, Rev. G has begun to frame these cues within a larger vision of intentional and shared spiritual practices. To Rev. G’s surprise, discipleship groups have formed within the congregation, with more and more individuals choosing to commit themselves to specific practices for a period of relational intensity and spiritual intentionality.

A similar theme plays out with Rev. D and Rev. R, both of whom organize their congregational membership around shared spiritual practices rather than the usual classes, committees, and programs of congregational life. Both pastors offer congregants and newcomers a specific frame for the nature of congregational life. They present the congregation as an intentional community of practice and invite persons to order their lives by these practices with the community. Such a frame for congregational life invites individuals to make a choice and recontextualize one’s life within the vision of the congregational community. The frame offers a boundary, which invites the individual to enact a new identity in the world as part of a particular community. In the case of Rev. D, this boundary work is relatively new, an experiment. For Rev. R, such intentional communities of practice have always been part of the congregation but now require greater effort to maintain in an environment where religious participation is more episodic. As Rev. R says, “religious people find us difficult because the ask or the bar of discipleship … is high”.

Framing is also used to amplify the peculiarity and particularity of a community’s social relationships. A frame that centers the openness and intimacy of a community, for example, creates a protective boundary around the community. To belong means to choose to enter an intimate space and to be open to the gifts and challenges of those in that space. Rev. C serves a small congregation in the restorationist tradition in the Bible Belt. Surrounded by large, program-driven mega-churches, Rev. C’s community has focused on the practice of hospitality, ordering congregational life around making space for one another. Formed by the broader church culture, she notes how easy it is for the “production values” modeled by influential churches in her region to shape the expectations and practices of her own church. “My concern is that a lot of churches, even small churches, are losing intimacy because they are trying to be like big churches … but we are really trying to hold onto cultivating intimacy, healthy intimacy. That includes, you know, good listening and informed consent”. In order to cultivate such space, she must offer a frame for the nature of the church free from the “production values” of program-driven congregations, thus creating a boundary, a marker that identifies how this space is different and how it asks something different from congregants. It is a boundary that asks one to join and participate in a dance of hospitality, rather than consume a church service. The individual is again given an opportunity to choose to join themselves and their journey to a community.

When pastoral leaders offer a new frame to individuals and congregants, they create a boundary around the community. The bounded community becomes a frame by which individuals might make sense of the cues which have arisen in their context or congregation. To adopt the frame is to identify with some element of the congregation and to enact a new social reality. That is to say, the integration of identity and purpose on offer is not pre-packaged or available in single servings. It is the function of a larger community of practice and involves crossing a boundary and making a commitment. According to Weick, the reality of this new commitment will create its own sensemaking momentum, as individuals seek to create a plausible and continuous identity within the new social and ideational reality (Weick 1995, p. 108).

5. Conclusions: Sensemaking and Polarities

In the 1980s, the missiologist Paul Hiebert brought the sociological distinction between “centered set” and “bounded set” communities into mission studies and church leadership literature (Hiebert 1983; Yoder et al. 2009). The basic idea is that people either organize in relationship to a shared boundary or are drawn together by a compelling center.9 Micahel Frost and Alan Hirsch illustrate this with a colorful metaphor drawn from cattle ranches in the Australian outback. Unlike ranches across the American Midwest, with miles of electric fences to keep cattle near the barn, Australian ranchers simply dig a well (Frost and Hirsch 2003). In an arid climate, the water source ensures that cattle will not stray too far, diminishing the need for fencing. The well, in this case, offers a compelling and vital center, which keeps the “set”—in this case, cattle—together. By contrast, a bounded set is a community held together by maintaining clear boundaries between insider and outsider. A study of Amway by Michael Pratt describes the bounded-set community as the ideological maintenance of a fortress, where sensemaking seeks to tie individual experiences back into the frames offered by organization (Pratt 2000).

Under the conditions of late modernity, we see what appears to be two mutually exclusive sensemaking strategies. In some cases, pastors responded to high levels of social differentiation to make the congregation a retreat center for individuals seeking meaning and purpose. In other cases, pastors articulated the boundaries of a community, defining the charism of the congregation and inviting individuals to join and participate. Different ecclesiological approaches might suggest that pastors need to choose one strategy over another. Is the Church a counter-culture, a theo-ethical “community of character” in the spirit of the Anabaptist tradition (Hauerwas 1981)? Such theological commitments would seem to inform the “intentional community” sensemaking strategies and understand the church in bounded-set terms. Pastors offer a clear frame for the spiritual life and invite people to join and participate. Or, is the Church a means of grace, a community of Word and Sacrament and a place in which and through which people might connect with the divine10 (Dulles 2002, pp. 55–68)? Such an approach suggests something like a retreat center, where people come and go as they navigate their journey with God: a centered set.

Pastoral practice, however, revealed fluidity across and between ecclesial traditions—mainline, evangelical, non-denominational, Anabaptist. Pastoral stories of participation and belonging established neither a centered-set nor bounded-set community but rather leveraged the gifts of both types, operating as a retreat center in some cases and an intentional community in others. Like positive and negative poles of a magnet, we see pastoral leaders managing a polarity rather than pursuing a consistent strategy of centered/bounded or retreat center/intentional community. On the one hand, the intentional community offers a clear sense of identity, a narrative structure, and a shared rhythm of life. It creates a strong center from which a congregation might come to understand its vocation and gifts. But its boundaries must be managed by offering a particular frame for meaning-making and by making a peculiar claim on its congregants. On the other hand, the retreat center makes very few demands on individuals, giving them space to make spiritual sense of their own lives and resources by which to do it. It makes it possible for the congregation to open its life to the greater community but falls short of creating a moral or formational community, a place in which the disembedded agents of modernity might re-embed their lives. Here we have a polarity rather than a dichotomy. Polarities name tensions in an organization that are necessary for its vitality, even though they seem at odds with each other. A vital organization manages a polarity by amplifying the strengths of each pole rather than letting the two cancel each other out11 (Johnson 1992). In managing this polarity, pastoral sensemakers might offer a clue as to the terms of belonging and meaning-making in late modernity.

Ulrich Beck claims that individualization results from the ways we are disembedded from the communities, narratives, and institutions which once integrated our lives into meaningful wholes. We do not cut ourselves free from these institutions but are set adrift by the structures of late modernity. We experience this as freedom and compulsion. We are free to choose our own life, and yet we also have no other choice. Because this is a structural reality, our independence is also a type of dependence. Cut loose from communities and dis-integrated, we realize our need for others, a need to be re-embedded in communities and institutions that can grant us meaning and identity. Individualization reveals our self-insufficiency, he says. Moving between continuous and discontinuous sensemaking strategies, pastors can and do respond to these sociological realities by creating boundaries that invite individuals to make choices, to join, to give themselves to something, even if it is just for a short time. And in eliminating boundaries and holding open a vital center of spiritual resources for individuals to utilize, pastors make it possible for people to make a life (and perhaps god) of their own. That is to say: late modernity requires intentional communities with a well-formed identity and clear thresholds for belonging and participation, but it also requires communities with clear values and practices on offer for self-directed identity construction. It requires intentional communities for reintegrating our lives and retreat centers for building our own lives. By managing this polarity, pastoral leaders show how congregations might engage this age of individualization.12 For the boundary and center just might offer integrity to one another, a creative tension that not only addresses the waves of identity work of late modernity but also keeps the congregation vital: a polarity whose tension is generative and energizing, lived wisdom that might invite us to rethink and adapt our congregational structures for this new era.